The Cassette: Part 1 of 5

1 

Leo shed his jacket at the office door and made it to his designated desk. It had been a hectic month with all the restoration and digitisation works going on, and they were nowhere near the finish line. The footage they were required to restore and categorise were old police evidence files, or in other words, basically stuff that the police needed in order to reopen cold cases. But even with three technicians on duty today, the workload seemed endless and the pile of cassettes only growing by the second. 

"Damn it!" Sam exclaimed, swivelling his chair around. "Dude, take a look at this. Do you see what I'm seeing?" 

"What is it again?" Leo asked as he reluctantly leaned over Sam's monitor. He had just arrived after nearly forty minutes in traffic, and the last thing he wanted was to be dragged into whatever Sam had found. Unfortunately, that was often the case. 

Sam had a habit of pulling him into things at the worst possible time. Sometimes, Leo wondered if Sam was genuinely oblivious or simply liked getting a reaction out of people.  

"See what?" Leo asked. 

"That's exactly what I'm talking about. There's nothing here!" 

"Dude, I'm not following you." 

But Sam had already stopped listening, continuing to rant under his breath. "Fuck! I should've known when I saw the tape. Can't believe I just spent two hours trying to fix this thing." 

On the screen, a black image flickered occasionally, interrupted by what Leo could only describe as some sort of out-of-tune static. But the footage showed nothing. Literally nothing. Just a black screen. 

"Hey, snap out of it. What tape are you talking about?"  

Sam opened his drawer and pulled out an old cassette tape with a battered casing, as though it had been handled roughly or dropped more than once, handing it over. 

What caught his immediate attention as he twisted and turned the casing was not the damage, however, but the label. There was no title, no case identification as one might expect, save for a string of faded numbers printed on a sticker. 

"That's strange," he murmured.  

"Strange? That's one way to put it," said Sam, adding. "You think someone misplaced their stuff and this somehow got mixed in with the case files?" 

Leo donned a glove and studied the tape closely this time, trying to decipher the fading coding on it without much luck, save from three digits. How was this even possible? There had to be something tangible at least, whether that was a case name or label, that could help them categorise it. But just these digits? They meant nothing on their own. 

"Did you look it up, just in case?" 

"No match. What do you think? A misplaced cassette? Should I call those bastards in the Case Review Unit and tell them to get a grip?" 

"Well, we don't know that for sure." 

"You don't think those bastards are pulling our legs?" 

"Not exactly, no." 

"What then?" 

Leo gestured at the monitor. 

"Looks like somebody went through a lot of trouble to tamper with the footage. Look – it's not completely black." 

Sam's eyes widened as he noticed the screen flicker, revealing a brief snapshot of the real footage beneath whatever had been used to obscure it. 

"You think you can recover it?" 

Leo drew a deep breath. "I mean, I can try. But—" 

"Do you, like, think it's some kind of cursed tape or something? Like in that Japanese horror movie? Ring or whatever." 

"What are you, five?" Leo said, already carrying the tape back to his desk. "Grow up, will you?" 

Behind him, Sam threw his hands up. 

"I'm just saying, dude. Better safe than sorry, right?" 

Although recovering the footage was definitely not their priority right now, especially with the piles of cassette tapes getting only higher, he knew he wouldn't be able to concentrate on the task at hand with his mind full of questions. Besides, recovering the footage would take no less than an hour if he got it right the first time around, and then they would be able to correctly categorise the tape and carry on with their routine. 

What he did not take into consideration was the measure the person who had tampered with the tape had taken to make sure whatever the tape showed remained a mystery. After rebooting the system and software more times than he should have, the restoration process finally gave some result, albeit after four or so hours after he started, which meant it was already time for a well-deserved lunch break. 

"You're not coming?" Sam asked as he got up from his chair, ready to join the others waiting for him at the door, exaggerating his accent at the end of his speech. "Hey, talking to you, Leo. Wang Luo." 

With his eyes glued to the screen where the tape was now seconds from being restored, Leo snapped as soon as he heard the exaggerated accent taken directly from some old Hong Kong noir film. The idiot did not even know the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese, and yet still had the nerve to mock him. 

"Stop acting like a douchebag and leave." 

"What? Just trying to keep my Chinese fresh, you know?" 

Leo turned to face him a soon as he heard this, no longer able to contain his annoyance. "It's Leo, damn it! L-E-O. And you're saying it wrong! I'm from the mainland, you son of a gun! We don't say it like that over there!" 

"Main—what? Never mind. So, does that mean you're not coming?" 

"Fuck off, dude." 

"Uh-uh. Scary," Sam said, raising his hands in mock surrender. "Seems like someone's not feeling it today, guys." 

"Leave," Leo said at last, calmer now, not in the mood to entertain the other. "Just... leave me the fuck alone." 

"All right, all right. Whatever. Let's go, guys." 

He sighed, inhaling deeply to calm his nerves. Sam kept doing that, trying to put him down in front of everyone and then acting as the friendliest guy ever. The double standards, man! The double standards!  

Shaking his head, he once again shifted his focus to the monitor, where a pop-up message relayed that the footage was now restored completely and the digitised file compatible with the computer hardware. 

He clicked on the play button. 

A grainy video of what looked like some kind of interrogation room played on the screen. Apart from the constant glitching and buzzing sound from the static, nothing dramatically caught his attention. Had he not been able to hear the recorder in the background, he would have thought this was an image and not a video. 

After watching the still footage for a few minutes, playing and replaying back and forth to catch anything unusual or something that could help him categorise the file, he turned it off and decided to watch the rest at home now that he knew there wasn't anything on it that required his full attention. Thus, he uploaded the digitised file to his private account as well as on the cloud server and then resumed tackling the huge pile of tapes on his desk. 

Fast forwards five hours later, back in the single-room studio apartment, Leo powered on his computer after downing some beer. 

The rest of the footage was the same as the earlier parts, save from one single detail, one he almost missed had he not played the video back for a double-check. Something was wrong with the angle of the recorder. In the earlier parts of the footage, it was situated in the corner of the interrogation room, somewhere on the ceiling or near it, thus giving a bird's eye view of the room. But at one point, the angled tilted, albeit only slightly. It was a miracle he had noticed it at all.  

What he could not make sense of was... the how. The recorder was out of reach due to how high situated it was. No one had entered through the only door visible, either. None. And even when he considered the low possibility of there being another door out of the recorder's reach or a person somewhere in a dead angle behind the recorder, then he would be able to see shadows at least, wouldn't he? 

He rubbed his chin, thinking hard. Was he missing something? Maybe the light source was too weak? That was why it didn't quite reach all corners and, therefore, did not catch any shadows that showed up behind the recorder? But that high up? No human being could reach that high without a ladder, and the angle of the recorder should've shown him at least some parts of the ladder itself had it been used. So, how was this— 

Ring. Ring. 

Leo jolted from where he sat, almost cursing out loud from the sudden ringing. Before he answered the call, he took a gander at the clock on the wall, noticing that it was past midnight. Although the odd hour was unusual in and of itself, it wasn't this that bugged him as he saw the words on the display. An unknown caller. Who on earth would be calling at this hour? Was it from the nursing home? But as far as he knew, the facility's calling hours were between 10 AM and 5 PM. Unless—a lump formed in his throat at the thought that something terrible might have happened to his mother. 

He took the call. 

"Hello—" 

"Leo, my son! You okay? Why you never call me? Always I call you." 

Frowning, Leo changed ears. 

"Where's Mrs Campbell, Ma? How did you—" 

"Shh! Tā yào lái le!" 

"What? Ma? Ma! Who's coming? Who's—" 

"Bùyào! Don't open door! Don't—bùyào! [inaudible]" 

The call ended, cut off by his mother's screams. 

"Ma! Ma!" 

Panicked and drenched in cold sweat, Leo tried to call the number back, but no one picked up. The screen stayed unresponsive and black, the ringing looping into suffocating silence. For a few moments, he didn't move at all. Could not. 

His hand remained locked around the phone, his grip tightening without him realising it and knuckles turning white. Even his breathing came shallow and laboured. He swallowed once, then again, but his throat felt tight and dry, as though something had physically lodged there. What had just happened? Something was wrong. Very wrong. Why would his mother scream like that? Like she was... like she was... 

He forced the thought away before it could fully form, refusing to give it shape. Instead, with a jerky motion, he unlocked his phone again and scrolled through his contacts. 

The ringing went on for a while before Mrs Riley answered. He knew this was not an ideal hour to be calling her, but he needed someone to go check up on his mother, who had recently been diagnosed with psychosis related to the onset of her dementia five years prior. 

"Hello? Mrs Riley, this is Leo. Leo Wang. It's about Ma." 

"Mr Wang, I'm so, so sorry. I meant to call you as soon as I heard the news of Mrs Wang's passing, but—" 

"P-Passing? I'm not—what did you just say? Passing?" 

"You haven't heard yet? Mr Wang, we lost your mother earlier today. I'm sorry for your loss. I truly am." 

His hands shook and his vision became blurry with the suppressed tears now trying to escape. It took him a moment to calm his nerves and regain his bearing. Dead? That couldn't be true. He just—spoke to her?  

"The staff found her on the floor with a bedlinen around her throat. It looks like she couldn't take the suffering anymore." 

These words snapped him out of his bleak mind and the unanswered questions. "What?" 

"I know this is hard to accept. But—" 

"Hold on. Are you saying she... killed herself? But I don't understand! You said—no, you promised that she'd be under strict surveillance once she—" 

"I know you're hurting, Mr Wang. But there's nothing we can do to change the fact that she's gone. For the better or worse." 

"For the better or worse?" he repeated, completely out of his mind. "How do we know she wasn't killed? That someone—" 

"Listen, I'll be in my office tomorrow. Once you've calmed down and can think straight, you're free to come and we can talk over the details. What do you think? Mr Wang? Hello?" 

He loosened his grip on the phone as a sudden thought hit him. 

"It's impossible." 

"I'm sorry? What did you just say?" 

"I just... talked to her. Heard her voice." 

"How long have you gone without sleep, Mr Wang?" 

His grip tightened again at those words. 

"What?" 

"You said you were working on digitising some files the last time we talked? Maybe—" 

"We never did. Why would I tell you something about my private life?" Then, after a brief pause, quieter now, more wary. "Who... is this?" 

The line went dead and the real Mrs Riley called, but he did not answer – just stared blankly at the display until the ringing stopped and he played the voicemail sent seconds later. 

"Mr Wang? I'm so sorry for calling you at this hour. But I just received the news of your mother's passing. Please, come to the nursing home as soon as this message reaches you. I'll be waiting." 

But Leo did not move. Instead, he curled in on himself like a child, shivering, his arms locked tightly around his body. 

His bloodshot eyes then drifted, almost against his will, towards the ajar bedroom door. In that moment, his mother's voice began to repeat in his mind, insistent and forcing itself into place, refusing to allow him to dismiss what just happened as imagination or hallucination. 

It was not. He just knew, if nothing else. 

"Don't... open the door?" 

What door? 

From Where the Tracks End - Part 3 of 3

Photo by NicoleLaurenPhotography on Unsplash

3

I didn’t once look behind me, not even as the darkness swallowed me. Every step I took sounded wrong, though… somehow. Not sure how to describe without sounding mad. To be honest, I couldn’t even tell if the tunnel was guiding us forwards or pushing us deeper against our will. But I never looked back, never. Had I done so, perhaps I would have noticed that there were no longer any beams of light coming towards us. But I didn’t. I just followed Brandon, or rather, I followed his footsteps. And for some strange reason, he wouldn’t stop running, not even as the entrance of the tunnel became a black hole behind us.

Only when I grew tired and slowed down did I notice how strange Brandon’s footsteps were. It was like someone kept running in place without moving, neither slow nor fast. I couldn’t even discern whether the footsteps were coming from somewhere in front of me or behind me.

“Dude,” I began, still trying to catch my breath from where I had hunched forwards. “I don’t think I—”

The tunnel breathed. That was the only way I could describe it. The air pulsed as though the stone walls themselves inhaled and exhaled like a living being, and my breathing fell out of sync with it, and for one dizzying moment, I wasn’t sure if I was the one gasping or if this forsaken place was. Somewhere ahead, faint at first, then came the rhythm of wheels on tracks, the sound of a train that couldn’t possibly be there. Then hymns, like children’s voices rising and overlapping until my ears rang and my senses became distorted.

Then I saw it.

A pair of legs. Skinny. There was no body attached to it… I think. All I knew was that I never took my eyes off the grassy railroad, not even once. Yet this person, or whatever it was, was not Brandon. I just knew it. Still, I could not raise my head or look up; instead, while still hunched forwards and holding my breath, I staggered backwards just enough for the distance between us to be in the ‘safe zone’.

And then I looked up. I wished I hadn’t. With bony hands outstretched, a malnourished kid lunged at me as soon as our eyes met, aiming for my neck. My legs went completely numb as I tried to flee and fell, crawling and crying on my fours like a bloody toddler, before stumbling back up and running with all I had towards what I thought was the exit. But then the footsteps slowed, and what remained was that strange sound of someone running in place, so I came to an abrupt stop and listened. The sound was growing louder, I could tell, but it wasn’t actually moving – more like it was running faster in place.

Then it stopped.

I covered my mouth on instinct, stifling the scream, trying not to reveal my whereabouts in the dark that kept growing darker and deeper by the second. But I was nowhere near the exit. I was sure now. Couldn’t even see it. Had I run in the wrong direction? Or was the darkness messing with my senses?

Drop.

I instinctively reached for my nose.

Drop-drop.

Something slimy had fallen, something that felt slightly grainy as I rubbed the liquid between my fingers. I couldn’t see what it was, only that it came from above me. Even the taste was odd against the tip of my tongue. It had a pungent kick to it, one that made me grimace as I tasted it. It wasn’t blood, though. This was something far worse.

I fetched my phone with shaking hands, unable to calm down as I found the flashlight icon on the screen. It worked this time. Before me was a sea of darkness that even the flashlight could not penetrate or illuminate. But it was better than pure darkness.

Drop.

I gulped hard. I wanted to direct the flashlight above me, knew I had to, but my hands wouldn’t listen. My whole body was crippled, and my senses were on high alert. Were I even breathing? Damn it!

What I did next even I have a hard time understanding. I guess my brain just couldn’t take it and completely shut down. I shit myself. I had never done that before, but as the urine got all over the place and soaked through my underwear, I did heave a breath of relief. It kind of anchored me to reality, you know? That I hadn’t completely lost it and that I was still alive, somehow…

That was when something brushed past my ankle. It felt cold and slick, but was gone before I could react. My flashlight jerked upwards still, catching absolutely nothing, but the air smelled, I don’t know… off? I had never encountered such a smell before, and whatever it was, it made me stiffen and hold my breath for a moment before once again relaxing my shoulders. I was safe. For now, of course. Stil…

The moment, however, did not last long. Not long enough, that is.

As I moved my head back, still catching my breath, a pair of bony arms suddenly lurched and held me in a chokehold, tackling me to the ground and scraping my throat and tearing at my skin. It came out of nowhere. I couldn’t even see who was trying to choke me because I lost my grip on the phone, and the flashlight just switched off on its own. But I had adjusted to the dark well enough to realise that the force trying to end me was not a child after all, but an adult man so malnourished he passed off as a boy.  

He had empty sockets where eyes should be, a long and thin beard, and hardly anything to cover his private parts. From his mouth dripped that foul-smelling saliva all over my face. At some point, I decided to fight back and punched the stranger repeatedly on his bald head until he let go, and then I started to run like I had never before. Not even once did I look behind me, dared not to, and after what felt like an eternity, I got out of the tunnel. Alone.

I figured, no, I hoped, that Brandon had made it out safely already – that he had to – and ran straight to the security and asked if they had seen Brandon. But instead of listening to me or asking why I looked like I had seen a ghost, they detained me and brought me to the police station. Even there, I tried to explain to the officers why I had trespassed and that they had to let me call Brandon and make sure he was okay, but they wouldn’t. Man, they didn’t even bother listening to me!

Looking back now at this old age, although I’m not so sure, I remember that one of the guards muttered something under his breath as he cuffed me. At the time, I thought it was just an insult due to my ethnicity, but later I realised he said: ‘Another one.’ Another what? I never dared to ask. Maybe I should have.

In the end, I spent the night detained and had no access to my phone until later tomorrow evening when my dad picked me up. But Brandon’s phone was completely shut down, and it dawned on me right then that there was a high possibility that Brandon never made it out of the tunnel. But I… couldn’t go there again. I tried. Numerous times. Even brought some people I met through Reddit, but everyone chickened out once I told them the real reason we were there. One puked before we even reached the fence, and another said he saw a child running between the trees. And so, by the time we reached the tracks, I was alone again.

Family and friends started calling me obsessed, unstable, and even cursed, while people online I had never met in person, gave me all sorts of wicked nicknames, such as ‘The Railroad Maniac.’ Maniac… What was I, a monster? I only ever wanted to find Brandon, come to terms with what happened that night inside the tunnel. What was so bad about finding out the truth? My psychiatrist even said Brandon wasn’t real, that he only existed in my mind. Even the kids back in school pretended they didn’t know him. It was like that place had erased all traces of him, and I just… couldn’t understand.

All I could do was stare into that suffocating darkness and call his name. I did that for over sixty years, and had I not suffered from diabetes and lost one of my legs to the darn disease, I would’ve continued to look for him still.

Funny thing is, sometimes, when the morphine dulls the pain and the world goes quiet, I… hear him. Or at least I think I do. And then I wonder if he ever left at all, or if I’ve been listening to the wrong side of the darkness all these years. And maybe – God forgive me – Brandon was still waiting for me. In there. In that all-consuming darkness. Thinking I abandoned him.

There you go. Call me whatever names you want. I know I failed Brandon; that he was the last person I should ever fail, but sometimes fate chooses us, not the other way around. Had I not found the strength in me to fight back then, I might have been trapped in the tunnel like Brandon. Besides, it appeared to me now at this old age, that Brandon had been lost to me the moment he heard those footsteps I could not, not until I was deep into the darkness.

That was why I chose to do something I should’ve done much earlier. I was going to return to the tunnel one final time and look for Brandon. Inside. I owed him that much as his one and only friend – the only friend of his who still remembered him. You see, the remorse was getting to me and digging deeper under my skin for every year. I did not have much time left, either. My doctor told me my arteries were almost clogged and too stiff from years of battling with diabetes, so that an aneurysm forming was not a question of if, but when. So, I decided to leave this world on my own terms.

The government was busy waging war on foreign lands under the guise of ‘forced democracy a la Afghanistan-style’ and creating the Middle East’s very own “Riviera” on stolen land, to have enough budget for doing anything about that bloody railroad. It had already become a famous site for numerous creepypastas over the years and attracted a huge amount of tourists each year, so that the whole distance between the railroad to the tunnel itself was full of placards of information about the viral creepypastas that had used the location as inspiration, as well as some lesser-known historical facts about its origin and so on. The tourists had also left soda cans and sweet wrappers along the rails so that the litter sparkled like confetti under the sun. A tragedy packaged for Instagram, I guess.

I didn’t dare to go during the night for reasons I hope I do not have to explain here, but since I went there in the middle of the day during a weekday, nobody was around save for me. In the daytime, I finally understood how absolute the darkness had become that night some fifty years ago. For a moment, I even thought I saw Brandon waiting just inside the tunnel, grinning, his hand raised as though to wave me in. When I blinked, he was gone, and the tunnel stood empty before me.

The whole place was located in the middle of what I could only describe as some kind of deserted highlands, leading straight into a chain of mountains, of which the abandoned tunnel was meant to lead straight through. But given the enormity of it all, just taking the train through that tunnel would’ve taken several hours – in the dark. And that was when I finally understood what happened to Brandon. What really happened, that is. And it had less to do with the supernatural than with the sciences.

It occurred to me at the time that Brandon might have kept going straight forwards and eventually set off too deep into the tunnel to make it back out. Yes, I did see that malnourished figure in the tunnel, but what if he, too, was another lost person seeing hallucinations due to malnourishment? I remember reading a case once of a woman who had gone lost in a forest she used to visit every week, and when they found her, she was so malnourished and frostbitten that she had gone into a state of hallucinations, so that she thought the people trying to look for her in the forest were some kind of monsters she had to hide from. When she was finally found, she was in the last stage of delirium and passed away in the hospital a day after she was rescued due to multiple organ failures. Maybe something similar was the case even here?

But this realisation set off another train of thought. If I were right and Brandon truly had been wandering the tunnel and gotten lost, he must have died a long time ago, and his remains buried somewhere in that darkness. Starting from here and going to the very end to pick up what remained of him was a bad idea, not to mention there was a limit to how long I could walk without tiring with the crutches. Also, I wasn’t that young man anymore, but someone on the brink of death. And what about my daughter? Wouldn’t she miss me dearly should I venture into the tunnel and not make it out again?

In the end, I could not go through with it. But by coming here, I finally understood what must have happened to Brandon and that strange man who had tried to choke me. Only, why did it have to take such a long time to realise the truth? And what kind of bastards had let those poor children ride a train for several hours in the dark just because of their skin tone? Sometimes I wondered if people who believed in the social construction of races even had a functional brain, categorising people into white, yellow, brown, and black, and rainbow, like they had a recipe on how to create the perfect human based off on the colour of their skin, disregarding that even within a country, people were born with different skin tones and intelligence levels.

Did I ramble on again? Sorry. I’m just a person about to die, so why not sprinkle a few truths here and there and provoke people into using their brains for once and be humans, with all that it entails?

From Where the Tracks End - Part 2 of 3

 

Photo by Hitesh Salaskar on Unsplash

2

I’m not really sure which one of us found that railroad, only that we somehow did. In hindsight, I might be the one who found it on some archived subreddit about the mysterious disappearance of 21-year-old Japanese tourist Minami Hitori. She had solo-travelled three European countries by the time she ended up in the States, where she supposedly had a boyfriend. Now, the identity of the boyfriend was never revealed, and the few accounts that seem to give some more information about him were all, unfortunately, in Japanese.

The day she disappeared, she notified her family back in Japan that she had booked a place for the night and would be exploring the area. No source mentioned what she meant by “exploring” since the original message was translated from Japanese, but given her last known location, the probability of it being the abandoned railroad near the National Park was very high, since it was one of those places tourists used to visit.

I actually found a translation of one of her last tweets, some guy on Reddit had been kind enough to share with the community: There’s something in that tunnel, and when you listen close enough, you can hear it. Nobody in the thread knew what she meant. Some thought it was mistranslated; one user even insisted that the original word wasn’t ‘listen’ but ‘come.’ Allegedly, the authorities changed the original tweet. That unsettled me far more, to be honest, and once I learnt about this whole tweet thing, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Also, to me, those words meant that she had been at the site of the tunnel before and left unscathed, judging by the date, so why hadn’t she that night?

But the railroad was not only abandoned, it was also known as the site of a huge train accident back in the 60s, which killed thirty individuals and severely injured just as many, most of whom were the orphans of slaves from a nearby monastery on a trip to the National Park the week before Thanksgiving.

It caused a huge stir back in the day and led to several policies on the safety of the infrastructure all over the country and demonstrations that led to hundreds of unlawful arrests when it was revealed by an anti-apartheid journalist that those children were deliberately chosen to take this very railroad, while their fairer-skinned peers had taken a much safer railroad route thanks to donations by a select group of white-supremacists that continued to follow the rules of the Jim Crow era and defended their right for apartheid despite they were no longer allowed by law.

A lot of subreddits had already explored and tapped into several theories, of which some were quite controversial in their own right, but no one had actually entered the railroad tunnel to find a trace of her. Not that it was easy to do so. The whole area was closed off to the public, and the only way to get to the tunnel was to go off-trail in the National Park, bypass security stationed there at all times and then follow the abandoned railroad for over half an hour in pitch-black darkness. This was by no means for the faint-hearted, but it was also the level of apparent danger that convinced us to just… go for it.

Bypassing the security was a piece of cake compared to the winding railroad that never seemed to end; we just ducked into the trees and snuck around the park like a pair of bloody ninjas. Man, that was hilarious! And the thing is, no one stopped. Even if someone did see us slip away in the shadows, I guess they assumed we were more ghosts than anything human. That insight, of course, gave us courage – courage that quickly turned into arrogance. Guy even joked about Emmanuelle at some point. That moron.

“Think she’ll be impressed when we come back alive?”

“Dude, she doesn’t even know we’re here.”

“What? You didn’t tell her?”

“Why would I? She has a boyfriend, dammit.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she can’t break up with him!”

I rolled my eyes, hearing this and just took the lead through the park until we were close enough to the guard post and could observe security closely.

Since the guards changed shifts approximately around nine o’clock, there were about two or three minutes for us to jump over the wire fence before the new guards arrived. Piece of cake! What was really fucked up, however, was how dark and quiet everything got the second we were half a mile from the National Park. It was like entering a portal into another world, one that was forever condemned to silence. Even the air shifted completely once we crossed that fence and became thicker without warning.

Honestly, in those harrowing moments in the dark, as we passed the guard post, it felt like even the crickets had gone silent. All of a sudden. Like someone had turned off the sound, and everything that made our little adventure less frightening. It would be a lie if I said I did not think about returning to the National Park at the time, but Guy seemed unbothered by the stillness. And so we pressed on. Like fools.

The deeper we walked in the gloom, the more it felt like we were being swallowed into a place that didn’t want us to come any closer. Even the stars above winked out one by one the further we ventured, as though the sky itself was warning us. Soon, there was only the black line of track vanishing into darker black ahead. I’d never seen darkness eat light so completely. It was like the world was shutting down all around us, and we did not see it coming. Not until it was too fucking late. Things didn’t get any better either when we realised something was wrong with our phones.

“Goddammit!” Brandon said, fumbling to switch on the phone’s flashlight. “Hey, does yours work?”

I tried to click several times on the icon on the display, but failed miserably. “Nope.”

“What the fuck? Maybe we should turn?” he said, adding. “Something’s… off. Can you feel it?”

This was the first time Brandon ever said anything about leaving. Why hadn’t he said so earlier? Then again, maybe he thought I wanted to keep going and just decided to follow my lead. I did keep quiet instead of speaking my mind, after all. But I couldn’t expand on these thoughts any further. Not entirely. Because before us, emerging from the darkness, the rails appeared without warning.

“Do you… see that?” I asked.

“Yeah. How can it just appear out of nowhere?”

I peeked over my shoulder, trying to locate where the tracks ended behind us, but couldn’t see anything but darkness. Brandon was right. How did it just… appear out of thin air? I understood that this place was abandoned, but for the tracks to just, I don’t know, show up abruptly was—

“There it is again! Dude, you can’t feel it!?”

“Hear what?” I said, looking over my shoulder and feeling creeped out. “Stop messing with me, dude!”

I wanted to laugh it off, but the hairs on my arms had already risen. It reminded me of that time when I was a kid and my cousins had told me that the djinn lived in abandoned places. Back then, I didn’t believe them. Tonight I wasn’t so sure.

Brandon insisted. “You can’t hear it!?”

“Dude—”

But my friend did not let me speak; instead, his eyes flickered to something in the dark as if he was trying to figure out what had yet to reach me.

“It’s almost like… What is that? Like some… I don’t know. It sounds like… footsteps? But not, like, normal. More like… more like…”

“Stop messing with me! You’re creeping me out.” I snapped, following his narrowing gaze fixed on the darkness. “Brandon, for fuck’s sake! Talk to me!”

“It’s… It’s gone,” he said, shifting his focus from the dark to me as I looked like a question mark. “It disappeared when you looked.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, but I had no words to respond to those words. Instead, I changed the subject to both calm myself down and make Brandon focus on the real reason we were here.

“Whatever. Let’s go before those guards decide to patrol.”

Honestly, we should’ve just bailed at that point. But I didn’t want to go through the darkness in the direction of whatever Brandon had seen. Not until it got a little brighter with dawning.

“Yeah… right. You’re right. I was just—”

“I don’t want to hear it, dude. Let’s just go!”

“…Sure.”

But even as he said that, his eyes kept peeking over and watching the darkness we gradually left behind as the railroad tunnel came into view in the distance. In the silence, I remembered reading that the children on that doomed train had been singing hymns before the collision. And maybe it was just my imagination, but as the tunnel appeared before us, I swear I could hear faint voices carrying the same melancholy melody. But that harrowing thought did not last.

We were so excited to have achieved our goal at the time that we forgot what had just happened and howled like the idiots we were. To be honest, I still cannot fathom how security missed hearing us, because we were pretty loud and just having a great time shouting into the silence.

Funny thing is, after we calmed down, some five or so minutes later, we realised we had nothing else planned for our little adventure. We were so sure that we would fail or be caught by security along the way that we now came face-to-face with reality in the middle of the night. No one knew we were here. Should anything happen to us, no one would ever find us, and that thought scared us witless.

“What now?” Brandon said.

My eyes fixed on the entrance at once, which gaped wide and where the bricks were stained with soot, as if something had burned its way out decades ago, but the scorch marks pointed inwards – not outwards. Graffiti scrawled across it too, half-faded, as though the paint had faded over time.

“Well, I’m not going in there. That’s for sure.”

Brandon glanced at his watch when I said this. “Me neither. But the next shift is in five hours, and according to my research, the security patrols the area every shift. Since we haven’t seen any light for the past hour, that means they will patrol the area sooner or later.”

“You want to hide inside that bloody tunnel?”

“You don’t?”

“Dude, I’d rather be caught! Like I’m being serious. Didn’t you just say you wanted to—”

“Can’t afford that. My mum’s all pissed ever since the police arrested me the other week, and this might just be the nail in the coffin!”

My eyes drifted to the tunnel suddenly, intrigued by a sudden shift in the shadows that resembled a figure. But as I blinked, whatever I thought I was seeing was no longer there.

“Dude, what’s the worst that can happen? She’s your mum, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, but she’s also a fucking lunatic, who’s threatened to send me to a yeshiva or cut off all financial help!”

“Yeshiva—what?”

“Never mind! You’re really going to leave me here? What about the assignment?”

“We already researched everything.; we even came here like fucking idiots.”

“Not everything.”

“What?”

“We didn’t research everything. Not yet.”

I should have caught on at that point that Brandon was acting out of character, but I must have been so freaked out by the darkness and overall atmosphere that I failed to notice.

“I told you, I’m not going—”

“Come on! Don’t be such a chicken, Hakeem! We’ll just hide there until the security leaves and, I don’t know, try to look around or some shit while we’re already inside?”

“We don’t even know for sure they’re going to patrol, you moron! I haven’t seen a goddamn light in ages and—”

“Yeah? Then, what do you say to that over there?”

I followed the direction of his pointed finger only to grimace from the absurdity of it all. Flashlight. Drawing closer. It was almost comical how the timing lined up, how those beams of light appeared right after we had this very conversation. Even then, however, I failed to notice this coincidence – that was no coincidence at all.

“Shit! Is that the guards?”

“I told you! Follow me! Hurry! Hurry, Hakeem!”

From Where the Tracks End - Part 1 of 3

Photo by Caitlin Taylor on Unsplash

1

I don’t know where to start. There are so many things I need to put on paper, but the words seem to elude me. The right words, that is. Honestly, I am afraid. I’ve finally come to terms with reality and the things that forever changed me, still…

The pen keeps slipping between my fingers, not because of the morphine, but because my hands shake when the house goes quiet. Unnaturally so. That’s when I hear those footsteps I heard back then and hear Brandon calling my name and pleading for help. But I shut him off every time, carry on with my life. In a way, I have to, if I want to keep my sanity – and health, too. The doctor said both my arteries were clogged and ticking on borrowed time. Maybe that’s why I’m finally writing this down… because I’m not sure which will come first: death or Brandon’s footsteps crawling back through the walls and the floorboards.

It all began with an assignment in college. I had just changed my bachelor’s programme from science to the arts after failing my mechanical engineering courses two years in a row. My old man was pretty pissed, for good reasons, of course, so when I told him I wanted to pursue a degree in journalism, he just let me, you know? But our relationship did go south for a while. He didn’t tell me off or anything like that, though; he just gave up on me, I guess. It made me want to prove myself to him, not by grades, but by doing something no one else dared. That was what the assignment really meant to me: a chance to matter.

Anyway, fast forwards to the assignment. So, Professor Brookes was kind of a weird person whom the other professors also avoided like the plague. Rumour had it she’d been fired from two other universities before ours, though no one knew why. Some said she’d written papers on topics so strange the administration had to literally hide them. Others said that she’d been caught sneaking into archives closed to the public. Also, she smelled bad. Like, really bad. Did she ever run a bath? Stranger still, she gave us the strangest assignments, and the one I am going to talk about today is one of those. But more on that later.

Once, she’d asked us to visit a graveyard at night and write down not what we saw but what we felt. You heard that right. Half the class handed in blank pages, and she just gave them C’s. Like, what the actual fuck? It gets worse. “The absence of sensation,” she told us, “is still a sensation.” Crazy bitch. Looking back now, however, I realise that she had some loose screws because what kind of professor even does that? She also used to pause mid-sentence whenever the lights flickered during class, and then she would stare at the ceiling for so long that the rest of us looked up too, expecting to see something moving, but we never saw anything out of the ordinary. Then, she would snap out of it and smile…

My name is Hakeem, by the way. I was the only student with a Middle Eastern name in class and a physical appearance that screamed “Muslim”. Sure, I was fasting during Ramadan and praying from time to time, but I was more of an agnostic than a Muslim in its purest meaning. I wanted there to be a life after death, only I wasn’t so sure whether there would be one, as some of my more devout family members wholeheartedly believed. Maybe that was why the idea of ghosts and curses fascinated me so much, because if the dead could linger and haunt the living, then maybe something lingered for us all, and death wasn’t just a locked door leading to the promised land.

The assignment we were given was to research a topic within the occult arts and then do a presentation on our findings. It wasn’t really a thesis, but we were told to follow the same principles and be as academic in our research as possible. Since I was into pretty much everything horror at the time and deeply fascinated with crime shows, I decided early on to find some haunted place and just… have fun.

So, Brandon and I teamed up to impress the girls in our class, especially Emmanuelle, my crush. She was an exchange student from Nice, and I had kind of set my eyes on her the moment she entered my life. She was gorgeous, had a nice body, and a sweet personality to go with it. I knew she had a boyfriend back in France, but that did not stop us from flirting, did it? Besides, she knew I liked her and probably saw it just as some innocent fling or whatever. Sometimes, during group discussions, she’d lean forwards just enough so that her hair brushed against me, and the rest of the guys, Brandon especially, would fall quiet as if she’d cast a spell. It wasn’t just attraction, though; it was the way she made the ordinary feel romantic. Around her, even Brandon’s dumb jokes were funny.

Who’s Brandon? See, Brandon is an interesting character even by my standards. He was the class clown and had a really goofy personality, and an overly sick tendency to do some slapstick comedy when nervous. One time, we were exiting the cafeteria on our way to class when he literally spilt a box of milk over himself after some chick waved at him. She was probably greeting someone she knew, honestly, but Brandon was convinced she liked him from that day forth, so he dragged me with him down that same corridor whenever we had a break. Poor girl must have caught on and never set foot there again.

But he had another side too, one most people missed because they never really gave him a chance. He’d linger after class to ask professors questions no one else thought to ask and spent hours on obscure forums reading about folklore legends, conspiracy theories, and ghost sightings – not because he believed in such things but because he wanted to understand why others believed them. He said belief itself was scarier than any monster. Yeah, that was the kind of person he was, and I loved the guy to bits.

He was a good person, you know? The kind you could rely on blindfolded through a dark tunnel in the dead of night, while simultaneously being chased by some shady-looking people – or ninjas. Man, I liked the guy! Never met a better person, honestly! I remember one night after class, Brandon dragged me into the library’s basement to show me a forum thread on hauntings in an abandoned hospital he had been hooked on and then went on to have a whole speech on the psychology of herd mentality among people who believe in the supernatural and how they egg one another on through blatant lies and made-up stories.

Still crazier, he was born into a Jewish family in the Polish suburbia and then relocated to Israel as a teen. But listen to this: Brandon was a pretty darn good human rights activist and did not once back off from standing up against what he believed to be right to do. Maybe that was why we got along so well, though I was more of a ‘who-cares-about-some-people-faraway’ kind of guy, and he was the literal opposite.

Sticks and Stones - Part 3 of 3

 

Photo by Dylan Hunter on Unsplash

3

Reluctantly, Christoffer started for the dumpster and climbed into it without looking back. And then, for a long time, nothing happened. He must’ve stayed in the container for several minutes when he finally dared to lift the lid and stick his head out, at which point, it had become dawn and the sky was painted in the shades of twilight.

Neither Betül nor Farouk was around when he climbed out, stinking worse than he could smell. But their absence was not the only perplexing thing. All around him, scattered at random, were what he could only call human body parts in all shapes and colours, as well as different stages of decay. Even the soil beneath his feet was full of bits of flesh here and there, sticking to his shoes like glue.

But before he could wrap his head around what had happened during those hours he stayed hidden in the container, he staggered back only for something to get caught underfoot, something that he immediately recognised upon picking up. It was a stone, one that belonged to Farouk. But what was it doing here?

He retraced his steps back to his apartment, taking in the bloody carnage all around him but unable to make sense of it. But the worst had yet to come, only he didn’t know then. When he finally arrived at the third-floor landing, the door to his apartment gave way without resistance and unlocked. Inside… nothing. Only traces of blood – a lot of it – on the striped wallpapers, on the floorboards that had become swollen. Neither his mum nor Reila was around, though. In their stead, something else was.

In the kitchen was a large pot bubbling away. As he crept closer, each step warier than the last, he lifted the shaking lid and came face-to-face with a stew made of human body parts. One of the severed fingers had a ring on it, one his mum had been gifted by his deceased father and never took off. This realisation made him stagger back, and his breath became shallow and laboured, and that was exactly when the living room door slammed shut with a deafening bang across the kitchen.

He whipped around and sprinted out the gaping front door, not looking back even once, not until he made it safely out of his apartment and was back outside. When he looked up at the third floor, however, a faceless shape waved at him from the kitchen window, and he fled that instant, springing wherever his feet took him. Once he came back to his senses, he was back at the site of the dumpster, or rather, back inside it, counting the seconds, wishing upon the stars for a miracle that this was only a nightmare and that he would soon wake up from it.

Once nighttime came, however, nothing changed. Stuck in a bad dream with nowhere to go, he climbed out and picked up more stones on the damp soul, and as if to keep himself from losing his senses completely, began to play by himself like a madman.

He must’ve played for several hours by the time he noticed the approaching footsteps and quickly hid back inside the container. Through a small gap, he saw the homeless people returning, each one of them chewing on a human body part. They settled at the dumpster site and drank all night, oblivious to his presence, and when morning came, they left.

This repeated for a few more nights, with the homeless people returning to the container with human body parts and then leaving only to return the next night. One morning, however, instead of waiting in dread for dusk to come, Christoffer decided to follow the homeless people who seemed to be unaware of him, no matter how much noise he made.

They wound up a dark pathway through an empty field or some kind of overgrown pasture no longer used and kept walking for hours on end without respite. And when darkness fell once more, the pathway came full circle, and they were back at the site of the dumpster, only now Christoffer knew where the source of all those human body parts came from.

During this nocturnal walk with no aim or purpose, the homeless people picked up wooden sticks now and then, and by the time night came, those sticks became human body parts. But the homeless people weren’t even aware of this, for they were far gone and unsound of mind to think straight and get back to their senses to realise they were caught in a loop of some kind, reliving the same day over and over, and somehow, he had ended up in that loop, too.

By the second week, he decided to pick up some sticks himself to quench his growing hunger, and although the sticks tasted weird and gamey, like rotten flesh, he did not mind since he knew the sticks were anything but human. The taste even grew on him after the fourth fortnight, and he ended up joining the homeless people, who did not mind him following them around and mimicking them.

Then, one night, as they were having a feast by the fire, something that had never happened happened. One of the homeless people turned to him as they were about to get back on their feet and follow the dark pathway till dusk. This was the first time they ever talked or acknowledged him, as if mimicking them had somehow allowed him to become visible again.

“You stay here, climb the container.”

And so he did.

When morning came, he climbed out only to find himself back in the normal world, no longer bound by the time loop. But several years had passed since then, although he had stayed the same age as when he disappeared. Everyone he knew had long since either passed away or moved to another place – everyone save his good friends Betül and Farouk, who had grown grey and as old as the hills.

They recognised him immediately, although it took him a second to recognise them. None of them could explain what had happened that night, only that he disappeared after climbing into that dumpster. Betül had told the police what had happened, but the police refused to believe her story, and so he was registered into the system as another runaway. When they asked what exactly had happened during the time he was away, he couldn’t tell the truth – or rather – the whole truth.

The two of them passed away not long after this fated reunion, dying almost a week after one another. The entire neighbourhood was in mourning during the funeral, and Christoffer had attended it with those stones that Farouk always carried with him, the ones he found in the nightmarish loop. But as he was paying his respects to his two friends, he heard a familiar rustle in the clump of bushes near the Muslim cemetery, and he decided to take a look at what it was.

There, hiding in the bushes, were some wooden sticks arranged in a neat circle. Without realising it, he picked some up and started chewing, slowly making his way back to the funeral attended by the whole neighbourhood. When they saw him approach, they gasped collectively and pointed fingers at him. When he looked down at the stick, it had turned into a human leg dripping with fresh blood.

Then… a chilling scream.

A woman rushed from the clump of bushes with a child in her arms, one of its legs missing. When she saw him, with his teeth still dug into the tender flesh, she let out another bloodcurdling scream, and before he knew it, the people around him tackled him to the ground and kept him there until the police arrived. When the police asked for his name, he gave them the one his parents gave him, but they wouldn’t believe him, saying he couldn’t have stayed this young after all those years.

Now he was locked up in an asylum, counting the days. His psychiatrist said he had been cured of his illness and that he would be able to return to normalcy once the related paperwork had been sent off to court. In the meantime, to kill some time, he played stones by himself and occasionally chewed on his own arms to satisfy his hunger. Once he returned home, the first thing he would do was to climb into the dumpster. That way, only a child stupid enough to come near a place like that would go missing, and the police would write them off as simple runaway cases.